Portable sensor devices are becoming more widely used in a variety of fields. Such sensor devices may require correction of systematic errors, typically in the field prior to use. There are many specific reasons why a sensor device such as a magnetometer or accelerometer sensor triad may require calibration. It may be necessary for example to correct for scale factor, biases, or non-orthogonality of the three sensors making up a sensor triad. Alternatively, the temperature, local magnetic or gravitational field may change or there may be misalignment between two or more sensor triads due to manufacturing variations or limits of the technology. It is expected that calculating the desired result from calibrated data will yield better accuracy than merely using the raw sensor data.
This patent application provides a viable approach to solving this challenge and presents a practical implementation of that technique.